Are you hungry right now? I suspect a few of you will answer, yes. Now, have you eaten in last three or four days? I suspect no one reading this will answer, no. That is something to be celebrated. Most animals in the wild struggle to find food. Natural selection is a ruthless optimizer. If there is surplus food, the population will grow until some members go hungry. Early humans were no exception. Many humans still don’t get enough to eat today. But hunger is an enemy on the run, and it’s end is within sight.
The move to agriculture greatly increased how much food we could produce. It didn’t solve hunger, but it did lay the foundation. It wasn’t until the green revolution and the age of industrial farming that we finally began to push back the tides of malnutrition and starvation. With the selective breeding of crops, nitrogen based fertilizers, and farming machines, more and more people had enough food to eat.
We’re not done. Far too many people still lack ample food, but against this enemy, we will prevail. We will engineer more efficient, more robust crops. We will keep experimenting, learning the relationships between pollinators and plants, soil and microfauna, farmers and buyers. We will engineer new kinds of foods, from algae, bacteria and fungi. We won’t be limited by arable land. We will learn the secrets of photosynthesis and take those secrets to the stars. Can you picture it? Abundant food on Mars, in space, wherever we want to grow it, synthesize it, will it into existence.
But hunger is merely the first great enemy we will banish.
There are other enemies.
Disease.
Mental illness.
War.
Aging.
Death itself.
For better or for worse, we humans are great at demonizing the outgroup, the enemy. Well, if we are to hate, let us hate these enemies.
Malaria, cholera, HIV, flu, we have a message for you, listen closely. Fuck you! We don’t need you. You will not be permitted to keep taking our kin, our people. We will outsmart you. We will drive you to extinction. You will go the way of smallpox and polio, and every other disease will follow. We will use vaccines, gene drives, whatever it takes, and we will defeat you.
And we won’t stop there, not by half. We learn to understand how our brains function. We will defeat depression, alzheimers, brain cancer. We will learn the function of every gene, every strand of RNA. We will learn what causes our bodies to senesce and decay, and we will reverse it. No longer will we be forced to grow old and sick, wrinkled and unable to run and play. Never again will a loved one be ripped away from us by a death they did not choose.
The future where we humans triumph over disease and death is more than possible. It is within reach. No law of physics or chemistry dooms our bodies to age and die. We are weak and sick and hungry because that was the best evolution could do. But we do not need to remain slaves of evolutionary history.
Every part of our body is an organic machine. There is no soul beyond our comprehension.The stuff our brains do, that’s who we are. And we are fixable. Our internal systems can be improved, made more modular, more replaceable. Immortality isn’t a pipe dream, it’s an engineering challenge.
I won’t stand here and tell you that our glorious future, free from hunger and disease, is inevitable. It is not. There is no God to guide us to the promised land. There is no universal force to bring peace and happiness to all. Those who believe some god will come in the end and save everyone, solve everything, may not feel any special urgency to act. But we don’t have that luxury.
Solving these problems won’t be easy. The end of hunger, the end of disease, the end of death itself, these are obtainable. But if we are to obtain them, we must do the building ourselves.
You, and me, us. We must build the gene drives. We must develop the vaccines. We must prevent nuclear war, runaway climate change, and unfriendly artificial intelligence. This can be done, must be done, and humans are the only ones to do it.
A future filled with flourishing lives is one with fighting for. When the last hungry person is fed, the last disease vanquished, the last riddle of human biology solved, then our work will be done. We will smile, and laugh, and cry together.
And finally, at last, we will declare victory!
edit